An idea doesn’t have to be overly complicated in order to be brilliant and useful for the masses. This principle holds true for app development as well, and a clear testament to that is the Cydia store. Most of the tweaks available in the jailbreak store are single-purpose, and users still love them. Characount is the latest of such tweaks, and the functionality it offers is so simple, that you have to wonder why no one thought of it before. If you have ever used the stock Notes app in iPhone or iPad, chances are that the lack of any method of keeping track of character count might have annoyed you. A good word editor is never complete unless it can count characters and words, preferably in real-time. While Characount does not let you see the word count of your notes, it does the next best thing – it counts the characters your note is comprised of.

If you are thinking that you will have to select the text and then hit some kind of button to view the character count of the note, you are wrong; the tweak is even better. It adds an ever-present counter in the top bar, right next to the indicator showing the elapsed editing time. The counter added by Characount will work on older notes as well, and will display their exact character count.

There are a couple of features that will be largely appreciated in any of the future updates of Characount. First, it must add an option to see the word count, and it will also be nice to see the character count of only selected blocks of text. Even as it is, Characount is a pretty good tweak, as it works unobtrusively, and is available for free in the BigBoss repo of the Cydia store. After its installation, the tweak won’t add any Settings menu or Springboard icon, and takes effect immediately.